We left off with the topics of:
Fleeing a mob via a motor vehicle
Surviving a gang attack alone and/or while protecting loved ones

These two parts of the motorcycle attack are the most difficult.

Fleeing a mob via a vehicle should be easy.

Whether your attackers are on foot or on motorcycles, the combat formula applies. The rule of combat is “all other things being equal, the bigger stronger person wins.” So it should be easy, the car wins. You can flee by simply driving away or if your attackers are stupid enough to get in your way, use the mass of your vehicle and run them over. Unfortunately, this is why urban survival is different then surviving in the wild. In the wild you have to worry about these types of animals:

In the urban environment you have to worry about these:

The victim of the motorcycle attack in NY fled after he was attacked and as per news reports ran over one of the motorcyclists. Here, the attorney for that motorcyclist run over by the victim comforts the wife of the motorcyclist while announcing a multimillion dollar lawsuit filed against the victim driver.

So, it’s not that simple if you consider that if you flee one attack you may have to face another. You may want to consider the phrase “better to be judged by 12 then carried by 6.”

Surviving a gang attack alone and/or while protecting loved ones:

To survive a gang attack alone and/or while protecting loved ones, you have to consider the psychology of combat, your physical abilities, your fighting capabilities and the environment. At Zenshin LLC, we teach that there are typical psychological responses both the aggressor and the potential victim display. If you can interrupt that learned response you have a great chance of disrupting the attack long enough to escape. Of course, being physically fit is important, more important is knowing what your physical limitations and strengths are so that you can increase the odds that you will make good combat choices. Above, I stated the rule of combat is “all other things being equal, the bigger stronger person wins.” There is a second part of the rule that says, “although it is possible to change that outcome with skill and environmental factors.” Train everyday and when you are not in combat, practice how your environment may help you.

The planning you do now may help fend off all types of animals that may want to do you harm.

I have been challenging myself recently to ascertain if I am truly prepared to “be able to” survive.

This attitude is different from ensuring I have everything I need to be prepared. I have my bug out bag, the tools and items (such as water, fire implements and food) to help me if needed and have educated myself in those things that I think are important for urban survival; self-defense, fire making techniques, water purification, etc.

Although I have tried to challenge myself and put myself in situations that could test these skills, it proved difficult to do. You simply can not create a realistic survival environment in an occupied city. Yet, I wanted to try and really test my own personal preparedness. The only way to truly do this is to endure an urban version of Les Stroud’s “Survivorman.” Not so easy in our everyday city environment. I learned this the hard way when I tried to start a fire in a public place with a battery and steel wool in NYC and ended up having a long conversation with New York’s finest.

So how does one test their urban survival preparedness? I came up with a few ways and this series will chronicle these experiences. Today, we will talk about testing how I can move around the urban environment without using conventional means. Next week, I will report back on my diet experiment (do you know a city squirrel has 26 grams of protein?) and how that effected my ability to perform critical urban survival tasks.

So, the scenario is that the city is not safe to travel in the usual manner (streets, sidewalks and open areas). How can I get around to obtain the necessities to provide myself with food, water, shelter? More importantly, will I be able to travel this way if needed?

Okay, in the wilderness there may be trees and mountains that can be traversed if one did not want to walk on the forest floor. How can we move off the city floor in the urban environment? The most obvious solution is to go vertical using the buildings that are in every urban environment. Not so easy. Doors are locked and windows are barred and I unfortunately lack the spiderman ability to climb walls. The solution I found was fire escapes. Many building have them but they are especially designed for people to escape fire and go down and to prevent people from using them for going up. There are many versions and Wikipedia has a good article on the variations. If you study them carefully you may be able to figure out how to get the ladder down from ground level. For a more detailed lesson you will have to take my course Zenshin, Urban Survival Tours. I can’t go into detail here because the information can be used to actually burglarize apartments!

The fire escape lesson proved challenging in that it required a lot of upper body strength and more importantly, balance. To help me with developing this skill I took to the ropes. I spend the day at one of the largest rope courses in the northeast. The course uses a tether so it is safe but is loose enough so that it requires you use your core muscles and focus on balance. The workout was surprisingly rigorous and in the end, the practice really gave me the confidence to not only be able to scale up a fire escape but possibly use ropes to navigate around. I suggest going to a rope course that provides many different difficulty levels and several heights. There is a rope course at the palisades mall that is 85 feet high and has over 75 different courses. Take a look at their course and if you are not near them look for one similar in your neighborhood.

If you would like me to try out a particular urban survival technique send me a comment and I’ll give it a try and report back. If you have done one recently, let us know about your experiences.

Since the Summer is upon us in the northeast many of my fellow urbanites are heading back to the gym. There are gym membership discounts advertised all over the place. This got me thinking, “is there a workout that would address the needs of an urban survivalist?”

I asked a personal trainer at a gym that advertised one of those special rates what he thought was a good workout for an urban survivalist. Okay, he never really did not understand what an urban survivalist is but he went on with his sales pitch anyway. He said all said the same things trainers have been telling me for years; strength training with cardio training…. duh. Of course now there are all these new machines in the gym that my money would be well spent on.

When I looked at all the meat heads at the gym, it reminded me when I was in the police academy. There were some very large muscle-bound guys there. The funny thing was that they consistently failed gym. They couldn’t run, do push ups or sit ups and could not hold up their own body weight for pull-ups. Wait a second! That’s it…. those are the skills one would need to employ to be a successful urban survivalist. You need to be able to run from danger, lift your own body weight to escape various situations, the strength to carry heavy objects and the stamina to not gas out when you are defending yourself. Frankly, the gym machines are not the answer. But I did find inspiration in the most unlikely of places.

I remembered many years ago there was a park in NYC that was a block away from the “tombs” …. the local jail. Every day there were these guys who would work out in the park using only what was in the park as their equipment. It reminded me of how inmates worked out. They even had the quintessential convict physique. If you live in any urban environment, you know what I mean. You can tell when someone just got of the joint just by the way they look. Now, they had no choice on the equipment, that is a given; but they adapted to their environment and were able to condition their bodies to do what they needed to do. Run, jump, carry and fight. I am not going to glorify what these guys do. Instead I will take what i learned from them and adapt it to our needs. Given the light-hearted theme of this blog…. I present the manly art of playground workout (see below). If you can get past the guy’s mustache, it is really a good balanced workout. As you progress, you can add other elements. My friend has taken to lifting boulders on the beach….. If you have any other good workout ideas, use the comment function and share with the rest of us.

The Alabama Department of Homeland Security published some helpful information on surviving an active shooter scenario. Many thanks to my friend Ted for sending it to us. Feel free to comment after you watch the video and read the information on the site.

Here is the link to the Alabama DHS webpage that has additional information:

The video below is a security camera view of an actual unprovoked attack on a 16 year-old girl in the UK.

The victim was interviewed after the attack and gave this account.

The perpetrator was subsequently arrested.

This girl is an innocent victim and did not deserve what happened to her. Given that the attack was caught on tape, it gives us a rare opportunity to learn from it. So now we can discuss both the actions of the perpetrator and the victim. This does not mean that I believe the victim is any way at fault. The only one who is at fault is the person who perpetrated this crime against her.

There is one constant to predicting human behavior. A person’s past behavior is a good indicator to a person’s future behavior. There are of course some exceptions, such as when a person strives and works on their own personal growth. Most people, unfortunately do not. So when we have opportunities like this to dissect a crime between one victim and one perpetrator, we take it. Knowing a little bit of history between the victim and the perpetrator allows us to predict what may happen in the future to others under similar circumstances.

For instance, the victim recounts the interaction between her and the perpetrator before the attack. This interplay, whether conscious or unconscious, led the two of them to the end result. Although there may not seem like a lot of interaction to analyze here, there is. Unfortunately, discussing it all will take up more space than would be permissible in this blog. However, we can look at one very crucial time in the attack and analyze it. The moment just before the perpetrator attacks.

Slow down the video (you can press pause a few times). Look at what happens as the perpetrator comes within a few feet of the victim. What does the victim do? (it’s okay, go back to the video.. I’ll wait).

She clutches her handbag………. What does this mean? It means she was aware of a danger prior to the physical encounter. She may not have actually been conscious of this danger but she reacted to it by protecting her possession, her purse. Remember what I said earlier about human behavior? The victim throughout her life probably had many more experiences protecting her property then her physical self. So when she felt a danger, she did what she had learned to do, guard and protect her property. That is why at Zenshin™ Urban Survival Training we teach the Psychology of Combat. We teach our students to identify and pay attention to their unconscious driven behaviors that often help them “see” a danger before they are consciously aware of it. With this extra time, we then teach them the best way to react. Although this was an unprovoked attack, the victim had some time to react. She did… she clutched her purse.

What would you have done? What are you doing to prepare your loved ones in the event this happens to them?

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for us in the United States. I find myself in the unusual position of having too much material to write about to focus on just one thing. A hurricane slammed the east coast, the Mayan calendar debacle had people worried about the end of the world and 20 innocent children were murdered by a psychopath.

The usual debates on how our society will address and solve future tragedies soon followed. If you have not thought about how you well you are prepared for an emergency, listening to those talking heads should have gotten you going. I will not add to the debate, but instead say that being prepared means being prepared in spite of what policy makers do or not do. It is taking ownership of your own preparedness. This concept was reinforced when Sandy hit the east coast and for days the residents of Staten Island and the Rockaways were forced to fend for themselves. We are always thinking that the next disaster would be a natural or man-made disaster; but what if it is a shift in society? Are you prepared for that? Below is an article regarding the thoughts of Jim Rogers, co-founder of the Quantum Fund. He has some predictions regarding our financial societal future. What would happen if people with money no longer have it and the power associated with that money shifted to those without it?

Article:

In 1973, George Soros and Jim Rogers co-founded The Quantum Fund. During the following 10 years, the portfolio gained 4200% while the S&P advanced about 47%. The Quantum Fund was one of the first truly international funds.

In December 2007, Rogers sold his mansion in New York City for about 16 million dollars and moved to Singapore. Rogers claimed that he moved because now is a ground-breaking time for investment potential in Asian markets. Rogers’s first daughter is now being tutored in Mandarin to prepare her for the future. He is quoted as saying: “If you were smart in 1807 you moved to London, if you were smart in 1907 you moved to New York City, and if you are smart in 2007 you move to Asia.” In a CNBC interview with Maria Bartiromo broadcast on May 5, 2008, Rogers said that people in China are extremely motivated and driven, and he wants to be in that type of environment, so his daughters are motivated and driven.

In 2002, Rogers said that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s “reaction to the stock-market bubble has caused two more bubbles to grow: a real-estate bubble and a consumer-debt bubble.” In 2006, Rogers said he was shorting US financials, home builders and Fannie Mae.

On November 4, 2010, speaking at Oxford University’s Balliol College, Rogers urged students to scrap career plans for Wall Street or the City, London’s financial district, and to study agriculture and mining instead. “The power is shifting again from the financial centers to the producers of real goods. The place to be is in commodities, raw materials, natural resources.”

In May 2012 he remarked during an interview with Forbes Magazine that “there’s going to be a huge shift in American society, American culture, in the places where one is going to get rich. The stock brokers are going to be driving taxis. The smart ones will learn to drive tractors so they can work for the smart farmers. The farmers are going to be driving Lamborghinis. I’m telling you. You should start Forbes Farming.”